166: war!

Bang!

The second bullet grazed past Da Zhuang's mechanical arm, leaving a deep scorched mark on the prosthetic's metallic surface.

It seemed Da Zhuang's prosthetic was of good quality; after being hit by Valentine's specially customized armor-piercing bullet, it only left a mark and wasn't penetrated.

However, just one more armor-piercing bullet would break through Da Zhuang's defense and send him to meet his maker.

Valentine understood this, and Da Zhuang understood this too.

Da Zhuang, who had been stunned by his teammate's sudden death, was instantly jolted awake by the imminent danger to his life.

The two-meter-tall modified human let out a beast-like roar, and the heavy machine gun he was holding began to spin wildly, unleashing bullets towards Valentine and Toke as if they were free.

The sole remaining Death Squad grunt couldn't protect Da Zhuang, and if he stopped firing and turned to leave now, Valentine and Toke's marksmanship would show him what it meant to court death.

Da Zhuang, effectively put on a grill, could only hope to kill Valentine and Toke before his bullets ran out and he needed to reload.

"Damn it!"

Valentine and Toke both ducked back behind the signal warehouse.

A string of bullets tore the metal wall on the outside of the signal warehouse into a honeycomb.

Fortunately, the signal warehouse had three layers of walls: an outer layer, a middle layer, and an inner layer.

The heavy machine gun bullets struck the alloy wall of the middle layer, making clanging sounds.

Hot shell casings rained down at Da Zhuang's feet, and the acrid smell of gunpowder filled the air, driving him even crazier.

The increasingly short bullet belt already revealed his fate.

...

Fang Yun leaned against the corner, streams of eerie green data constantly flashing in his prosthetic eye.

With true strength far beyond the Third Order, he could spare mental energy to monitor Valentine and Toke's situation while engaging in a cyber offense and defense battle with the Death Squad Hacker.

The Void Walker Self-Starting Protocol and the Thought Acceleration Matrix Protocol (passively activated) were already in "ready" state; as long as Valentine and Toke faced genuine life danger, these two protocols would instantly activate.

After observing for a while and finding that Valentine and Toke were not in danger, Fang Yun temporarily delegated the task of battlefield monitoring to Human Intelligence Ascension.

Human Intelligence Ascension, with spare computing power accounting for 85% of total computing power, was fully capable of handling this task.

Fang Yun refocused his attention on the offense and defense battle with the Death Squad Hacker.

(PS: Fang Yun can multitask three ways, but habitually maintains the normal human state of focusing on one thing.)

Cyberspace is composed of endless data; from a human perspective, it can be simply described as "an eerie blue/deep green/dark red/pure white/pitch-black virtual space."

Fang Yun's consciousness was currently traversing cyberspace.

A Fifth Order multilayer firewall served as the inner soft armor, and a Fifth Order ICE disguised as Third Order served as the outer armor.

(PS: In this book, ICE and personal firewalls are two separate things, roughly equivalent to the main gate of a house and the small door of a bedroom.)

Using defensive golems as shields and offensive golems as spears.

Fang Yun held a shield in one hand and a spear in the other, fighting the Death Squad Hacker in the space composed of data.

In cyberspace, the usual definition of distance no longer applies; the distance between data entities is determined by "data transmission distance," which is "data transmission speed × data transmission time."

As long as the data transmission speed is fast enough, even if two data entities are located at opposite poles of Earth, in cyberspace, it's equivalent to being face-to-face.

In cyberspace, besides "distance" not having the same usual definition as in the real world, "attack," "defense," "combat methods," etc., also have many differences compared to the real world.

Attack and defense are competitions of "the exquisiteness and stability of data structures" and "data density."

The more stable and exquisite the data structure, and the greater the data density, the stronger the attack power and defense power manifested in cyberspace.

As for combat methods.

Can you imagine what a battle between mages would look like?

The direction of gravity can be arbitrarily altered as needed, and what you step on can be the floor, the wall, or even the ceiling.

With a wave of the hand, a wall will appear to block the enemy's "data missile" attack.

With a stomp of the foot, a plane will appear, providing a place to stand.

In cyberspace, every Hacker is a "mage."

The more powerful the Hacker, the more omnipotent they are in cyberspace.

The Death Squad Hacker fighting Fang Yun was quite good even among the entire Third Order.

If it were a fair duel, he should be able to defeat most Hackers on the street.

Unfortunately, the person he was facing now was Fang Yun, an old schemer who had hidden his true strength.

Although the Death Squad Hacker built line after line of defense and manifested weapon after weapon, Fang Yun still easily broke through all his defenses one by one and neutralized all his attacks, as if entering an uninhabited land.

"Warning: Prosthetic load reached 120%, neural network load reached 127%."

The Death Squad Hacker's status detection program issued a warning to him.

The pop-up window that had been floating before his eyes since a short while ago was constantly flashing red light symbolizing danger.

His System and prosthetic were about to give out.

"Damn it, where did this freak come from!"

"His computing power level is clearly average, and the total amount of data transmitted in a single instance isn't high, yet his strength is ridiculously powerful!"

"How did he come up with those exquisite data structures?!"

This was like someone who had never known the concept of functions seeing a function for the first time.

Fang Yun built his golems with a Fifth Order technical mindset, causing his golems to firmly suppress the Death Squad Hacker in terms of data structure stability and exquisiteness.

If things were just like this, it would be alright.

If only the golem's data structure was superior, then Fang Yun would at most gain a slight advantage in direct golem offense and defense battles.

And when the technical difference isn't significant, battles between Hackers will last a long time.

The Death Squad Hacker couldn't be retreating step by step like this.

But the problem was that Fang Yun could firmly suppress the Death Squad Hacker in many aspects, whether it was the superiority of data structures or the insightful analysis, prediction, and utilization of the enemy's offense and defense strategies.

It had been nearly five minutes since the Death Squad team first engaged in a firefight.

Suddenly, a data stream pierced through the Death Squad Hacker's ICE and personal firewall.

In the real world, in a room 150 meters away, a gaunt man suddenly twitched all over.

Under the effect of "Neural Meltdown" (a variant golem of Synaptic Meltdown), the man's entire nervous system convulsed, and then was burned into segments by strong bio-currents.

As wisps of blue smoke emerged from the brain-computer interface, black, oily liquid also flowed from the gaunt man's seven orifices.

After a short scream, the gaunt man collapsed into the freezer.

Bleeding from the seven orifices, his face was contorted in a grimace, and his body was twisted.

The Death Squad Hacker was declared dead.

...

Time rewinds three minutes.

Behind the signal warehouse.

Valentine spat out a mouthful of bloody foam and pulled a smoke grenade from his leg holster:

"Same old rule, first smoke one side, then assault from the other."

Toke checked his shotgun ammunition and grinned:

"Looks like the victory in the kill bet belongs to you."

"I have a 'Cold-Blooded Camouflage Module' installed, you don't, so the task of protecting Fang Yun can only be left to you."

"That's true. Be careful."

"Okay."

Valentine violently threw the smoke grenade, and thick smoke instantly enveloped the entire rooftop.

Da Zhuang's left prosthetic eye's thermal imaging function was disabled due to the heat source inducing components in the smoke grenade.

Under inertial thinking, Da Zhuang continued to spray bullets towards the previous location.

Valentine activated the "Cold-Blooded Camouflage Module" he usually hesitated to use and quietly crept towards the rooftop where Da Zhuang was.

In the last two seconds before the "Cold-Blooded Camouflage Module" duration ended, Valentine successfully reached Da Zhuang's feet.

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

The first bullet pierced Da Zhuang's throat cooling tube, the second bullet shattered the palm of his hand holding the trigger, and the third hit him directly between the eyebrows.

Da Zhuang's massive body swayed, and finally, like a felled redwood tree, crashed to the ground.

Valentine's mind relaxed, and he was just about to catch his breath.

"Watch out!" (Comm)

"!"

Another Death Squad team had already climbed onto the rooftop from the other side of the building.

Just as Valentine was about to be exposed to enemy gunfire, Fang Yun's voice suddenly came through the team communication channel.

"Valentine, nine o'clock direction, 25 meters away, three targets are approaching." (Comm)

"Note, on the fire escape on the right side of the distant building, there are two more people climbing up."

"I will provide you with Hacker technical support shortly, resolve them with accurate marksmanship." (Comm)

"Fang Yun!" x2 (Comm)

"Great, it seems you've already defeated the Death Squad Hacker." (Comm)

"Congratulations." (Comm)

"Various interference golems have been deployed, now's the time." (Comm)

Fang Yun's prosthetic eye constantly flickered with blue light, acquiring real-time location data by hacking into the enemy's communication channel, then publishing it in the team channel, thereby marking it on Valentine and Toke's tactical virtual vision interface (colloquially known as the player interface).

With the help of the "mini-map," Valentine instantly grasped all the enemy's location information.

His pupils suddenly contracted, his body reacted faster than his mind, instinctively raising his pistol and aiming the muzzle at the newly arrived enemies.

The new reinforcements clearly did not anticipate their own Hacker dying so quickly.

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

The pistol fired in rapid succession, three bullets accurately hitting the eyebrows of the three enemies.